Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders Review

it's the i'm sure there are people out there who thought this game was a dream kingdom under fire the crusaders is a tactical rts action hack and slash rpg something that was an xbox exclusive in 2004 then 16 years later it got an official pc port better late than never huh this is a very basic port because yeah you can technically play with mouse and keyboard now but that's like saying technically you can skip work if you light yourself on fire i mean you could but this is a game you play with a controller the only fancy new visuals are that you can turn up your shadow resolution by just starting a game you are treated to a huge amount of lore that's because crusaders is a sequel so while i'd wager most people know this game in heroes i'm gonna go over the weird road this franchise has taken in 2001 we've got kingdom under fire a war of heroes it didn't sell well in the west but did very good in korea that could be because this game and the entire franchise is korean what's clear is that a war of heroes desperately wanted to be a blizzard game it tried to combine both warcraft and diablo and it wasn't so good at that it also started with a huge lore dump and combining the mistranslations and weird writing a lot of finer details will become borderline incomprehensible the shrek storybook and crusaders does cover the big point there was a war between good and evil and a mysterious relic called the ancient heart if you see the heart or touch the heart or think about the heart you turn evil how the [ __ ] do you beat that apparently the answer is god gets really pissed off and gets rid of it so where the battle and heart smiting took place is now known as the holy ground okay but quick side note the ancient heart also resurrected and created this world's version of sauron we've had kmart sauron actual sauron now make way for baywatch sauron the overlord of the dark legion is rick blood master of the orcs and darkness rick a war of heroes is mainly generic fantasy they lived together peacefully for many prosperous centuries until the day a great evil arose so when the first game is like this it makes crusaders so much stranger you go from a typical old man talking about the magic kingdom to i'm desperately trying to find the outhouse at a metallica cover band venue [Music] that's a bold new direction and as i'll talk about soon they kind of pulled it off but we're not done yet with its mix of strategy and action and constant metal music i don't get blizzard clone out of this like i did with the war of heroes instead it's we believe the way googin will find this hardcore also we're really gunning for the badass deal of approval this year and maybe the year after because then they released a follow-up just called kingdom under fire heroes which is basically the same game but with some new campaigns and refinements this one's gonna come up again on 360 they made kingdom under fire circle of doom which removed the rts elements entirely to make it a hack and slash this didn't go over well but you could play as a crying elf girl who could kill enemies with her tears i i have no clue so for kingdom under fire 2 let's bring back the rts stuff and make it an mmo i'm gonna level with you i have no idea what's going on in the series so if something weird in crusaders is explained somewhere else i probably won't know about it they tried to sell this as mainly standalone and we'll see how they did going back to the intro the game's premise looks pretty simple don't believe me i'll show you check out these deals no oh god this reeks of the hex gerald we must go essa needs to be warned wait look [Music] make them pay with their blood swing away boys just swipe out the enemy you'll be golden after the lore dump you have two campaigns to choose between the human soldier gerald who is basically tutorial man and lucy the dark elf of the dark legion by beating hers you unlock a hard campaign for each faction the hard campaigns do expect a lot more out of you compared to the base ones it is weird that almost half the game is just preparing you for hard it does try to ease you into the experience but it almost goes too slowly gerald's missions can be so leisurely that they're basically a different game compared to kindles but i'll get into that in a bit visually crusaders does some impressive things for an xbox title it blows my mind how many characters you can have on screen fighting at once this was later in the console's life cycle so they'd gotten pretty good at optimizing it but wow it does look like the draw distance was improved for pc but even in the immediate area it's an intense amount of action a lot of maps are still drowning in fog it's not as short as something like morrowind but it's a less detailed world it basically had to be to make this many characters work even with that there were some times where i thought the fog added mystique to a level a force becomes ominous a giant creature looks like something straight out of the mist i still wish they bumped it up more for the pc version but it has its moments bad ones too because the terrain generally is barren and all the trees and world objects don't look nice either and will mainly get in your way sometimes there are more filled in areas but the biggest battles will never be here the more a map looks like the gobi desert the better chance you have of getting a big fight the units themselves are good models for an rts game all of the officers and named characters also get some extra detail ironically it's the cutscenes or the weaknesses really show up because they put the camera right in their faces while they're just doing their flap breathing animation thing they can look like nightmare people which i don't think was the intention still there is some unique art direction to be found for once the forces of good got most the varied and more interesting designs the dark legion mostly has similar flavors of orc there's green greener undead the dark elves don't have much variation either which you know i i give him a pass the true big issue is the camera it was mainly a huge issue in gerald's campaign but that could be because his had the most trees in it the angles you can have depend on where you are in the map so even adjusting it you can still be blocked off sometimes the camera wants to be in the stratosphere sometimes it wants to dig for worms usually it's fine and you don't need to adjust it too much but it adds randomness and unpredictability and sometimes crucial moments sometimes you walk through the woods fine sometimes you can't see that said it's really the sound that stuck out to me with the exception of the main menu every single song in the game is metal i can't stress enough how constant it is hearing about the story mission briefings the missions all metal [Music] sappers and catapults are to concentrate on destroying their barricades [Music] the rear line will attack the main enemy forces and give cover to the sappers and catapults now i'm not a huge metalhead and i don't know how accurate i can be here the game does have a lot of music i liked they were not shy about the soundtrack they go so big with it that i'm actually shocked there are no songs with lyrics in them it wouldn't be out of place [Music] move this way [Music] don't be afraid [Music] there are times when it does chill out but it's not that often subjectively surely won't listen to heavy metal back to back for hours on end but this could be someone's dream game in that regard the issue is the rest of the sound for the xbox this game has some really [ __ ] up audio compression even after fiddling with audio sliders the mixing is just terrible but the worst part is when a fight is over [Applause] oh my god it's [ __ ] the cheering overlaps per troop unit and if you lose in a fight like this oh my god if your waveform becomes a solid wall it's time to [ __ ] start over again to add an extra layer of madness it's only a sometimes deal the actual battle soundscape is perfectly fine there can be low quality effects that stick out as being bad but they're not grating even the victory cheers will often sound normal how it's layered is so bad but you're not expecting an attack so the issue is you have constant pretty average to subpar battle sounds combined with an occasional nuclear strike on your ears and the whole time metal music is playing the music does come together with the action sometimes and it's very cathartic but the game is such a noise hurricane i can only play it in bursts oh right the voice acting look at the sun if there truly is a god he is on our side today now this will be the last briefing for today's mission so listen well have you ever seen hawks do anything right the first time ever now see to it what did you do in the war i babysat pigs that's what this sucks gerald i object to leaving our border post to attend mass at youngsberg sorters and we live to serve at first i thought that was a glitch but no insulting this insulting god the cadence would leave the to the holy ground and the army they're censoring the word pope by just cutting the audio what he's a major player too so this is bizarre it does explain why you can't turn off the subtitles or else you'd miss part of the story characters will also say capital g god but the captions change it to the god lowercase it'll mess up sentence structure too like someone had just used ctrl f for the script this is clearly some last minute censorship and for everything people could get on the catholic church for just mentioning the pope maybe a few hundred years ago in some select cities but not in 2004 south korea did and still does have a significant christian population there so i thought maybe they were pushing the boundary of some kind of local law but no from what i found at the last second the developers were terrified that including the pope would offend westerners you can't exactly remove him from the story at this point when he's so integral so they clipped all audio mentioning him and in subtitles he's just the patriarch boy if only they knew where things would be so soon anyway the pc release also included the option for the original korean voice acting which seems way better technically and delivery wise for this we have been bled white soldiers behold the holy ground still i don't want to be getting into the story just yet despite all of its many many faults the gameplay is worth talking about by using your right stick you control the direction and the range your troops move in by holding a shoulder button you can expand the mini-map and move your forces that way you can move all your forces at once or cycle through them for individual orders there is a learning curve to this and it does explain the slowness of gerald's campaign despite first impressions there is a shocking amount of depth for one with the triggers you can change the formations of most units putting your soldiers in wider formations allows them to move and turn faster a tight-knit formation can make units sneakier and harder to see if they have shields they're better at covering each other from arrows each has benefits and drawbacks and you can be adjusting these almost as much as you're moving your army however not every unit uses these formations in the case of archers the triggers control how wide or narrow their shots go if your enemy's position isn't clear or you're fighting from extreme range you need to make guesses on how you should be shooting or you can send a smaller force or deployable scout ahead to act as a spotter then you can get the exact bombardment width you need also take into account the position of your ranged units where they are relative to the enemy is the sun in their eyes is anything in their way there is a lot of good tactical gameplay to be had and not all units can be set to attack and forget with cavalry you don't want to move them onto the enemy but instead move through them they'll barrel through weaker troops and can take out a formation without taking a scratch you could micro them around for max effectiveness or set some waypoints in a busy area and hope for the best though again you've gotta be thinking carefully are there anti-cavalry units in the area where a good charge can delete a unit a bad charge to them can have your own wiped out so if you're quick and clever enough you can bait fast movers into spears that they can't turn away from easily or in the case of the dark legion the anti-horse throwing axes not everything will add up sometimes it's fine must have an orc for a tailor again these are just some maneuvering examples in battle you have a resource called sp which might be special points i don't think they say but you earn it through general combat and victories and gain more by pulling off tactical maneuvers you can then spend these sun tzu points on unit abilities human archers can use fire arrows to burn down forests and enemy positions contrast with dark elf archers who can make magic arrows for extra damage or summon a magic fancy tree of healing because of course they do that there are sappers who can place burmese tiger pits landmines and other toys from the viet cong fun box to bait enemies into though they can also go on anti-trap duty themselves and sometimes units are led by officers who know magic so sometimes you send out a blizzard or plunge your enemy into darkness so while all of this is happening how does the action hack and slash kickassing fit into it it's a tricky situation it's deceptive because at first it seems undercooked and just kind of bad when instead it's well thought out but it doesn't show in the first stages of the game when a unit led by your hero engages the enemy the game shifts over into action mode both squads engage on their own and you can personally run around slapping people each campaign only has one controllable hero gerald is your basic swordfight man i can't say anything bad because i make guys just like him in most rpgs he hits with a big sword blocks with a big sword and hates the orcs all this fried hog all we need now is some scrambled eggs lucretia of the dark legion is all about speed and anime [ __ ] she can't block but she can dodge she likes bullying her ex-boyfriend that's my lucy don't call me lucy you gigalo kendall is a slower powerhouse warrior he carries a mason halberd and is a loyal servant of the pope when he wins fights he's already looking for the next heretic to smash rainier is the dark lord of heckster he has an evil sword and loves running around in a loincloth in world of warcraft pauldrons he parries by using the force and is rumored to be rick blood of course he's rick blood i am rick blood the characters have different fighting styles but calling what they have move sets would be generous you have your light and strong attacks and maybe two or three unique combos per character they also have a special execution move that does more damage but costs sp if the hero's unit has officers in it they can also spend sp to use the unique officer assist attack these can be helpful but they're things you've usually picked out far before the battle started you never have something like a duel with another unique character you can try to find the enemy unit's officer and kill them if you pull it off morale shatters and the squad disintegrates certain characters are much better at this lucy takes a while they watch sauron can one shot them usually though half the challenge is finding the leaders since they don't always stand out they can often look identical to regular soldiers and you can only pick one out when you whack when a health bar pops up summed up there's not a lot of depth to the action mode which reasonably you might have been expecting more out of because the dynasty warriors in the room is very focused on pulling off combos and special moves and first looking at crusaders you might expect it to be a dynasty warriors clone the combat here is simpler but it's because the developers didn't want you stuck too far into it you still have your troops to cycle back to instead of staying completely in the fight you send out a cavalry charge or move your archers behind the enemy both tactics and pure ongobunga hits reward you with sp which you can use on either so you could pull off a flank with archers but then go right back into action mode to pull off an assist move crusaders really is about strategy more than anything and this is reflected by the other side of the game which is battle preparation as you win missions you're awarded with golden experience again this is tied to your sp levels so the bigger your brain the more you gain your squads all have a level but it's determined by the leading officer so experience is spent on them but really it goes through the whole unit which at first seems odd but there is a good reason for this as long as the unit has the required skills it can convert into another one freely an officer could lead spearmen in one mission and then use mortars in the next your leaders will be specialized for only a few types but you do have some flexibility due to action mode your campaign hero is always stuck with a melee unit but for their underlings you can adjust all kinds of things around you could focus on a troop type or unlock a magic specialization it's also here you learn that troops are resistant and weak to different damage types armored knights get owned by lightning orcs have an innate weakness to ice and the undead hate learning about jesus which in this setting might be orc jesus i may have missed that part when you're done with experience you can use the gold to hire more officers and get more options how many troops you can deploy is limited so it's not always ideal instead you're usually buying new equipment which can have all kinds of bonus effects these are also level restricted so there is a balancing act between your skills and your money playing your cards right you can get some absurd min maxing like what if my hero's unit was virtually immune to melee damage and was constantly self-healing if you spend a lot of time in action mode you could give your heroes something like an elemental weapon there's a lot to play around with and to add an extra layer of greatness to the system the units do physically change based on the upgrades at first glance it's easy to see crusaders as a dumb metal mosh pit but there's so much behind it you'll never be controlling a huge amount of units and some like flyers are controlled through the d-pad like an ability this causes some drawbacks later on the hard campaigns give you a ton of freedom but what's actually viable is much more limited your enemies are far more reactive and now they cast spells like merlin has learned he has only a week to live later missions become pure endurance where healing magic can be incredibly helpful before you need it now if you became reliant on abilities instead of movement and formations that'll really hurt you in these sections it expects more clever maneuvering from you here than ever before which is cool and i like that but it becomes clear a lot of fun options yet before will melt away as the stakes raise things can start feeling even more repetitive than they were before if you like the proper massive battles there's gonna be a lot of them so that brings me to the story the overall points are very simple but there are finer details i'm not even going to bother to bring up there's a lot of political details that mainly rely on you knowing about the first game and other points are addressed in this game but instead in heroes which is both a prequel and happening at the same time so the story isn't all here to begin with dark elves are ruled by vampires but there are high elves who want to rebel but they use the terms interchangeably so haranadin finally falls under this high elf's feet is this not the first time you're leading an army this large my dark elf and look i don't give a [ __ ] in the campaign map you can get some story manage your army and poke at some lore tidbits a lot of information can come from eavesdropping at pubs gerald's campaign might have the least information here because the pub is full of people complaining about the elves or as they call them the darks are coming from the southwest those darks planned this all along look what those darks did to our people you go to bars where generic rock plays and overhear people loudly complaining about darks this isn't my first rodeo with this so unfortunate translation aside that's probably the most interesting thing in gerald's campaign he is the most xbox game protagonist who wants to wipe out the enemy and get revenge in retrospect it's neat but it's a horribly generic first impression for the campaigns lucy's campaign is more entertaining but also for a dumb reason instead of their dialogue being we must swipe out the enemy and defeat the evil they argue constantly they try to bring up the elf political situation but it's basically a joke it's like the cast of the jersey shores trying to do a table reading of the council of rivendell but there was a party the night before where everyone cheated on everyone so they keep breaking character to yell at each other they go to meet the dark lord of the orcs and this is their first reaction raniere has arrived wow finally in the flesh oh my god he's ripped it does devolve back into dry politics but good god it's something kendall is also wipe out the enemy man but he is uncovering something his campaign takes a dramatic turn and i would say the exact same thing about rick blood's campaign both are fighting for control of the ancient heart but something doesn't seem right also the orcs in his pub really just want to farm sometimes they want to use the enemy as fertilizer but they really love farming and not all of them want to eat man flesh these are weird orcs anyway if you don't want spoilers go to here okay so remember the village burning in the beginning that was a false flag attack by other humans again the details are in the next game the pope received a vision from god to destroy the ancient heart but so did someone else a man named walter walter was going to make a secret alliance with dark elves who didn't like being ruled by vampires to help him find the heart as you'd expect this kind of team up would be very frowned upon so they had to do it in secret a nearby villager saw the meeting and ran home to keep the secret walter and his troops would have to slaughter them all this is the first mission of walter's campaign in heroes and it's pretty brutal as the war kicks off walter does manage to get the heart but the pope for some reason says that walter has stolen it so the pope uses kendall to try and hunt him down and retrieve it kendall does catch up with walter but walter claims the pope wants to keep the heart for himself why would the pope not want to break what god told him to in rick blood's campaign it's revealed that the heart has direct control over him whoever has it can directly puppet him so he's trying to find it for himself to stop this he breaks away from his own homeland and fights everybody on the way to the heart he's desperate to control his own destiny in gerald's campaign he's just the big evil bad guy and in a terrible slow motion cut scene rick rolls one of his friends directly into oblivion but he doesn't slaughter everyone else then despite the efforts of everyone walter manages to fulfill god's plan and break the heart giving a pre-rendered cutscene for the first time in the game [Music] [Music] [Music] which god did this vision come from [Music] it turns out breaking the heart starts what looks like the advent it's kind of amazing nothing to this point indicated the game would go to this kind of scale anyhow that's when the demon swarm begins the next missions get different your enemy is now an apocalyptic swarm of demons the world is now threatened by a cosmic horror the demons will consume all of life and usher in the age of darkness without the heart baywatch sauron will slowly become mortal and one day die he's just as horrified as everyone else what have the humans done this is [Music] no rick blood initiates peace talks with everyone and unites the world against the threat he explains that there's a god of light and darkness but only one can be awake at a time whenever the heart deteriorates from the ravages of time one god awakens and the other goes to sleep it's actually supposed to be the age of darkness but someone had destroyed the last heart early so in cablosa the god of darkness has successfully tricked his time back rick blood becomes the hero in uniting the world and says things that i would never imagine from this character design i want to return the world to the age of light it's far from the first game to pull out the third faction who's a threat to everyone but it does it in such an interesting and unexpected way generic xbox man and his heroism are just a pawn for greater schemes religion itself is mostly wrong and are just lovecraftian elder gods the immortal dark lord figure knows all this and has been working with it in mind this story has some fascinating elements but a lot of execution up until now has been terrible heard you might get promoted soon way to go lucy no thanks to you dumbass while this only happens at the tail end of the hard campaigns they both have the most torturous final mission possible it's the same for each too pierce the surface of encoblosso with a flying unit then conduct a ritual to get inside of it the camera has generally been better in the hard campaigns but now this is all trees swarms of demons packed inside a giant forest during a snowstorm and the map is laid out like a canyon that you need to snake through if you pull it off the mission then begins the second part which is killing the avatar of the dark god from inside of him i've gotta say when i started the game i did not see things going this way but halloween is right around the corner the k berserk mission sucks in a lot of ways it doesn't feel like an ultimate test of your tactics or anything you learned inside the eclipse is slightly better but it's a slog of a battle up until then it is fun blowing up demons with artillery but they managed to make that get old i should never be tired of shelling demons when you win you do get to see it die and explode which is satisfying but the epilogues after that are weak there are a lot of tidbits here but out of everything i mainly recall how many ex-girlfriends got credits imagine if every game did that crusaders is incredibly ambitious and especially for an xbox game there's a lot of strategic depth to it and many ways to play out missions it's a full-length game just running through all of them once it is held back by the camera general clunkiness and some atrocious sound at points but a lot of it might already be addressed in a way there are seven campaigns and i'm not far in but what i've played of heroes fixed a lot of it the camera behaves way better with obstacles the fighting flows a little smoother and there's no nuclear cheering [Applause] good work it also has custom battles in it so there's a lot to dig into both the pc versions came out for 20 which is far too expensive for this kind of port i did ask if they could put it on sale for the video but i haven't heard back yet so we'll see i can recommend crusaders in the same way you recommend like a really violent b movie it's violent and silly you can't believe some parts they think you'll take seriously but you can see that this is a cool idea and you wish they had more time and budget but maybe that couldn't help as much as you think because this is so different even that comparison doesn't feel fair because this is a genuinely tactical game it's something unique i'm sure there's a lot of people who picked this up for the first time as a kid or a teenager on xbox and for them it was an awesome game in a lot of ways they were right because the core gameplay holds up it's just those details that a lot of people take for granted that do hold it back you know the idea game won't try to blow up your ears sometimes that's it for now but october is coming i might have time to talk about a smaller horror game or two because unfortunately for us all another adventure game video is in the works one far darker than the druids i'll see you then maybe do i like baldur's gate yeah but that video is a long ways out i'm still irritated by what beamdog did with one thoughts in the buggy launch of the new pathfinder game i already assume new games will be all kinds of messed up and crpg's is like 10 times that after pillars of eternity one i don't play games like that until they've been out at least a few months do you remember the first video game that you played i actually do it's probably cliche but it was the original mario brothers and i was playing it with my dad he was visiting japanese friends in their country and he saw their system there and he learned about games that way which is funny because they had been all over america at this point i don't know how he missed it but i guess i've always been many years behind with games since birth really how long do i play a game to see if it's worth the effort if you mean on my own unless i've been told something usually between two to three hours if it's for a video i think i've played to the end every single time usually multiple times is there an era of games my brain is hardwired to like well i don't know about hardwired but late 90s and early 2000s ones are generally more interesting the high budget games were generally chasing unique ideas over trends there's still cool aaa stuff now but a lot of it does blur together if you're not chasing the biggest budget title i can't think of a better time to like games okay until next time minigame what mini

Channel: MandaloreGaming

Views: 576,941

Rating: 4.9719172 out of 5

Keywords: kingdom under fire, kingdom under fire review, crusaders, crusaders review, kingdom under fire the crusaders, kingdom under fire crusaders, kingdom under fire the crusaders review, kingdom under fire crusaders review, kingdom under fire pc, kingdom under fire crusaders pc, kingdom under fire crusaders pc review, kingdom under fire pc gameplay, kingdom under fire the crusaders gameplay, kingdom under, kingdom under fire 2, mandalore, mandaloregaming, mandalore gaming, kuf crusaders

Id: IYTsnNPu-0E

Length: 28min 17sec (1697 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Thorebane]

Oh man, I remember playing Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes, and honestly, it's probably one of the oldest games I love.There was multiple storylines, that eventually all connected from different aspects.Different battles strategies and areas to fight.MASSIVE maps and battles.Different lieutenants/boss abilities.And left it on such an amazing cliffhanger.

PS - Let's not forget the absolute amount of mental and metal songs that were made for these games!

Eventually went back to play Crusaders when I found somewhere selling it and loved that aswell. Although since playing heroes, I could tell a lot of things were fixed in between the two games.
Afterwards I tried Circle of Doom, where I loved the story/lore, but couldn't enjoy the new UI/battle aspect of it, and well... KuF 2 was changed that much that most people eventually gave up with waiting and even though it was finished, it wasn't the game we wanted :(

[u/CrazyMikeMMA]

one of my absolute all time favorite games. an RTS mixed with Dynasty Warriors and a helping of 00s nu-metal, and it was also hard as hell in the later missions. the review reminded me how the briefings felt more nuanced and actual.... war planned. Like real tactics were in it. So disappointed that the semi-sequel was a 3rd person action slash, then the real sequel went gatcha money MMO and almost exclusively asia after development hell. I've hunted and hunted for something that felt similar, but really there isn't anything like it.

[u/SofaKinng]

Kind of unrelated but did you guys know there was going to be a third person moba (think Smite) for KUF? It looked super stylish and honestly I just wanted somebody to make a good competitor for Smite in that specific niche of the moba genre. Unfortunately it was cancelled in development.

There should be some gameplay trailers floating around for it.

EDIT: Found one of the gameplay trailers for it, it was going to be called Age of Storm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdYN8y8zfaM

A lot of people at the time lambasted it as a rip-off unfortunately.

[u/Surca_Cirvive]

I fucking love this game and Heroes, man. Forever pissed off KUF2 turned in to some trash MMO cash grab. I hope the release of Crusaders and Heroes on Steam do well enough to get another proper KUF game.

Circle of Doom was kind of whatever, but I do think this game's universe/world/lore were actually pretty cool. The "heroes" like Kendal are so Lawful Good they're basically as bad as the actual villains like Regnier. The setting is pretty metal without going way off the deep end.

Shout out to Gerald’s theme.

[u/Beorma]

It's a real shame KUF2 became an MMO, because a true sequel to these games would be amazing. With today's game design QoL features and improved hardware, I feel like a new KUF game would be really popular.

[u/VincentVanSlam]

I’m Korean and even I didn’t know this game is Korean. This brings back a lot of memories though. From the censoring of the word “pope” and the constant metal, this really brings me back to my earlier years playing Korean bootlegs of popular games (at least with the earlier “Kingdom Under Fire” games”). If Mandalore likes this, there is another Korean game called Atrox which is basically a completely rip-off of Starcraft in all but name.

[u/BreakerSwitch]

Really reminds me of Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War, a game that I really wanted to like but seemed to bounce off of any time I tried. Sounds like this gets much more strategic and has a much more fantasy setting though.

[u/OrkfaellerX]

I'm confused, what exactly is the difference between Crusaders and Heroes? Is Heroes just a straight up sequel with a new story? They look very similar otherwise.

[u/ildrazi]

One of my favorite games. I have been looking for similar games on and off forever and I most recently found and have been enjoying Conqueror's Blade. I highly recommend it.